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Nintendo:Game plan to get rid of the spambots
For those who have visted the site in the past two months, I'm sure you've seen the countless and often times offensive ads that were posted by spambots - Bots that were created to add ads rather than delete them, meaning that these aren't humans adding these things, and no matter what you do - you can delete their spam as much as possible - it'll just keep coming back. I know a lot of members have left the site because of this, myself included for a couple months. But once the admin promoted me to Bureaurat and Sysop, it gave me access to delete any page and any member and even protect pages, which was great news. Here's why - I've noticed that the bots have been spamming about 1/10th of all the pages, maybe less. But they seem to only spam those pages and no others. So what I've done is 1. reverted it back to the regular page, without any ads, then 2. protected it so that only members can post on those certain pages rather than allowing people with only an IP address to post, meaning those spam bots won't be able to post on those pages anymore. Still, there are a few (I think these may possibly be real people, though I'm not sure) who actually go as far as to create spam-only pages rather than adding spam to already existing pages. This is worse, seeing that I'd have to delete the page rather than protect it, meaning they can go right in and create the page again. The people that make these pages also seem to have user names, and won't allow their IP addresses to be shown, meaning there's no real way I could ban them and keep them banned. Thankfully, they're not too much of a threat, and it's not that much of a hassel to delete their posts. Now, this is hard work - there are thousands of pages on Nintendopedia, and it's hard to go through everyone seeing if it's fine or not. So this is where you come in - If you find any pages or images (including that one where the Elephant is taking a dump... I can't seem to find that one, though I remember it prior to when I was an admin) with spam, then please notify me and I'll either delete it or revert it back to its original page depending on the case (the former if it was created for spam and nothing else and the latter if it was a developed page already with information). Also note that spambots may post ads onto your user or talk page (it happened to both of mine). If this is the case, then tell me if you want your talk or user page to be protected. Even if your pages haven't been attacked, it's always better to be safe than sorry! UPDATE 1: It seems like most of the spambots have stopped attacking regular, already created pages. There are still a few, though those are easily deleted. Also, some pages just keep coming back no matter how many times I've deleted them, so I've decided to just keep it on the site and lock it so they can't add any more ads. I'm trying to find out how to delete it and permanently keep it deleted, though no such luck. I'm also trying to figure out a way to dig it deep into Nintendopedia so that it'd be very hard to stuble upon... I'm thinking about just turning it into a redirect page which will go over to my user page, so that it won't be on the "random page" list...